Re: My reaction -- "WTF"
"Is this what programming has degenerated into?"
Nope. It is what JavaScript has degenerated into and it is debatable whether it has actually degenerated. It has always been the case that if your JS program is more than a hundred lines long then you've probably chosen the wrong language. At the time JS was introduced, it was intended to let you fine-tune a web-page with a few DHTML events, but if you wanted to do any actual programming then *obviously* you'd use a proper language and Java was available.
Sun and Oracle between them have more or less killed off Java in the browser (with years of consistently shit implementations and legal barriers to third parties doing something better), so *now* we have no other language for this platform except JS. The fact that no-one is sufficiently worried to fix this problem means either that nothing important is actually done using browser-side code or that everyone involved is an idiot. You choose.
Edit: For the avoidance of doubt, I should say that I *like* JS. It's typeless nature makes it really good for really small tweaks, which was its intended domain. I'm just aware that the same characteristics make it really bad for anything really large.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
